Network services are widely deployed and important in many networks. Services provide a range of features such as security, wide area network acceleration, firewall, server load balancing, deep packet inspection (DPI), intrusion detection service (IDS), and Network Address Translation (NAT). Network services may be employed at different points in a network infrastructure, including for example, wide area network, data center, campus, and the like. The services may be applied as part of a service chain.
Route (path, connection) tracing may be used in a network to identify problem areas and provide detailed information about the network. A trace may be used, for example, to determine why connections to a given node might be poor, and can often identify the location of problems in cases of instability or other malfunction. Conventional route tracing packets, however, do not follow the path of a service chain and therefore cannot be used to detect the liveness of a service path or information about services.
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